The Democratic Party leadership, both in the
Democratic National Committee and in Congress, is full of bad ideas these days,
and they're risking disaster because of it.

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After the November election fiasco, you'd think
a party that left controlling the governments of just 13 states of the 50
states, compared to 32 for Republicans, and that has just lost every lever of
power in Washington -- the White House, the Senate, the House and the Supreme
Court -- would be rethinking its whole approach to reaching American voters and
trying to figure out where it went wrong over the last several decades.

Instead we're hearing a whole lot of the same
old bad ideas, and some new ones that are even worse than bad.

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Take Nancy Pelosi, the dinosaur representative
from San Francisco who once was the House speaker, back when Democrats
controlled that lower chamber of Congress. She says Democrats should "just
wait" until Trump voters realize that they have been misled by their candidate,
on the assumption that they will then flock to the Democratic Party in 2018.

Just wait?
Doesn't Pelosi get it yet? America's working class -- black, hispanic
and white -- has for years been "waiting" years in vain for the Democratic
Party to come back to its roots and start helping them, instead of helping the
toney entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and the toney hedge-fund managers on Wall
Street to get richer? Wait for what?
Voters both independent and Democratic abandoned the Democratic Party in droves
in November because they finally woke up and realized it had abandoned them,
and that "just waiting" for them to come back to a party that betrayed them is
not going to work at all.

As I've written, plenty of those "deplorables"
who voted for Trump in states that used to be reliably Democratic first voted
in the Democratic primary for Bernie Sanders, either as Democratic Party
registrants or as independents. They only turned to Trump when the choice was
Trump or Clinton, whom they recognized as corporatist Democratic party hack.
Many have told pollsters and interviewers that they voted for Trump and the
Republicans not because they liked them, but to "shake things up" because the
Democrats have been ignoring their plight.

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And then there's the corrupt and
self-destructive selection of former Obama Labor Secretary Tom Perez as the
Democratic National Committee chair, replacing the corrupt Donna Brazile, who
helped screw candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders out of the party's nomination by,
among other things, passing Hillary Clinton tips about questions CNN planned to
ask in her primary debate with Sanders, before herself being chosen by the DNC
to replace the disgraced prior chair, Rep. Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (forced to
resign at the start of last year's Democratic Convention because of emails
exposing her role in skewing the primaries in Hillary Clinton's favor). Perez
steamrolled Sanders' popular choice for chair, Rep. Keith Ellison thanks to the
votes of big corporate donors who, under a deeply corrupt policy of the DNC,
get to be DNC members along with top state party officials and major Democratic
elected leaders. The ramming through of the Perez selection as party chairman
was a big stick thrust in the eye of the increasingly large progressive wing of
the Democratic Party base, and that insult will cost the party incalculable
support going forward.

Dave Lindorff is a founding member of the collectively-owned, journalist-run online newspaper www.thiscantbehappening.net. He is a columnist for Counterpunch, is author of several recent books ("This Can't Be Happening! Resisting the (more...)